Chemistry Department home pageFour highly skilled and challenging faculty members are the main reason for students' fascination with chemistry at Augustana. Each holds a Ph.D., conducts lectures and laboratories, supervises undergraduate research, and remains accessible to students for individual discussion and consultation.
Your experience in the chemistry department will be uniquely your own - different from anyone else's because the faculty want it that way. They work hard to ensure that students can pursue the most versatile, individualized science program that a small liberal arts college can provide.
It's a program that not only satisfies the requirements you would need for a career in industry or medical technology, for example, but is rigorous and comprehensive enough to send you directly into a graduate program in chemistry. The Department is on the approved list of the American Chemical Society, a recognition held by only one-quarter of the college programs in the country.
Chemistry is a challenging discipline offering a wide selection of career options. These include basic and applied research, technical sales, commercial testing, environmental monitoring and industrial hygiene as well as medicine, dentistry, optometry and other health related areas. Employment opportunities include plastic, petrochemical and other chemical industries; testing laboratories; federal agencies such as Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture; high school teaching; and college and university teaching and research. Some of these challenging careers require graduate or professional school training beyond the bachelor's level.
Chemical engineering is an option which Augustana offers in conjunction with Columbia University (New York) or Washington University (St. Louis). In this program you enroll for three years at Augustana in a program containing chemistry, mathematics, physics and liberal arts prerequisites followed by two years in predominantly engineering courses at either Columbia University or Washington University. Upon graduation you will receive a B.A. degree in Chemistry from Augustana and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the cooperating university. Any student completing the prerequisite courses at Augustana and recommended by the faculty to the cooperating university engineering school is automatically accepted without formal application being necessary.
Most chemical engineering graduates go directly into industry where they work on development, design and operations of systems which involve chemical or biochemical reactions, and the transfer of heat and mass from one location to another.
An advantage of the chemical engineering program is the combination of the breadth of educational experiences afforded by a liberal arts college with a highly focused curriculum of chemical engineering. This prepares the graduate not only for the technical aspects of the engineering field, but also equips the graduate with the tools necessary to cope with the communication, social and economic factors that are encountered in all walks of life.
Biochemistry is an active interdisciplinary field with opportunities available in research and teaching in a wide variety of areas of biology, biochemistry, agricultural biochemistry, microbiology, cell biology, physiology, and pharmacology and government laboratories. Biochemists require a firm background in chemistry, biology, math, and physics for their work.
While biochemistry is not an undergraduate major at Augustana, you can obtain all coursework required for entrance into professional school and/or employment, while graduating with a degree in either chemistry or biology.
In addition to the close relationships you'll build with the faculty, you may qualify for a laboratory assistantship. Each year, a select number of chemistry students are chosen to assist instruction and research in the labs by preparing solutions, readying the equipment and tutoring classmates. If you're looking for additional experiences outside the classroom, check out the Student Affiliate Chapter of the American Chemical Society.
Additional science courses normally required of Chemistry/Chemical Engineering students include:
Chemistry/Chemical Engineering students interested in taking further courses in Physics, Mathematics, or Computer Science are encouraged to do so.
Students interested in biochemistry should include the following biology courses and their prerequisites in their program:
Housed in the Gilbert Science Center, Augustana's chemistry department has spacious areas for lecture, laboratories and research facilities. It's been called one of the finest equipped facilities in the country for a college its size. While the terminology may be a bit baffling at this point in time, you'll be interested in knowing that the labs are equipped with everything from ground glass equipment and single pan substitution balances to gas chromatographs, a variety of spectrophometers, electroanalytical instrumentation, a NMR spectrometer and a mass spectrometer.
As a graduate of Augustana's chemistry department, you'll be joining a distinguished group of professionals. Over the last ten years, approximately 45% of our graduates have pursued advanced degrees in chemistry in graduate programs at Iowa State; the Universities of Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, and California-Berkeley; Cal-Tech; Rice University; Texas A & M; and the University of Chicago.
Another 25% completed professional programs in medicine and dentistry at Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Washington University, University of Chicago, Baylor, Creighton, and the Universities of Iowa and South Dakota.
The remaining 30% have pursued successful careers in industry, government, college teaching and research.
For more information regarding our chemistry department, chemical engineering
or the biochemistry program, please contact the Department
Chair.
e-mail: earl@inst.augie.edu
Dr. Gary Earl, Chair
Department of Chemistry
Augustana College
Sioux Falls, SD 57197
Last updated
Access count since 18 July 2001:
Chemistry Department home page
